After a misstep on the fourth
day I managed to post one post every day, completing the rest of the
streak! This post is scheduled
to go out around the time my plane takes off.
I’m free!
I’d insert a Frozen gif here if I could find a good one,
but I don’t like any of the ones I found and besides, copyright is an
issue. So instead:
IMO2007.C6. In a mathematical competition some competitors are
friends. Friendship is always mutual. Call a group of competitors a
clique if each two of them are friends. (In particular, any group of
fewer than two competitiors is a clique.) The number of members of a
clique is called its size.
Given that, in this competition, the largest size of a clique is
even, prove that the competitors can be arranged into two rooms such
that the largest size of a clique contained in one room is the same as
the largest size of a clique contained in the other room.
Author: Vasily Astakhov, Russia
If you remember where I first posted this to break a combo, you have
an excellent memory and/or spend too much time stalking me. If you
remember the context under which I posted this to break a
combo, you have a better memory than I do.
Was my streak a success? On the bright side, I definitely generated
lots of posts, many of which were radical departures from my old
blogging habits:
I also had lots of fun conversations about my posts, such as:
?: wait giving the dragon un-poisoned water isn’t really SLAYING the
dragon though is it
?: i don’t actually know what detective conan’s premise actually
is
?: you have 87% more followers than me
?: but that’s not how nuclear anything works
me: a zombie would want you to think that, right? so e can eat
your braaaaiins
?: e?
me: gender-neutral pronoun
?: also just in general your style of procrastination as advertised is
awesome which is not to say it’s necessarily optimal but it
sounds awesome :P
?: why the fuck am I playing this game
On the dark side, most of these conversations were with the same few
people, so this blog still might be kind of an echo chamber. I don’t
know how to nurture an audience. Although to counter that again, it’s
not clear to me that I want a larger audience that much; communities can
require lots of attention and moderation if they get really big, and I
wouldn’t want to force my weird niche blog posts on anybody who isn’t
interested in them anyway (which is probably most people — I’m weird, I
know).
And worse, I don’t think the number of drafts stuck in my blogging
folder has actually gone down! I did clear out quite a few drafts at
first, but towards the end I was mostly
writing
brand new posts each day. I think
Bilingualism II was the last
post that contained any significant amount of text I wrote before
committing to this streak; it was posted a solid two and a half weeks
ago. I’m not sure what to make of this; perhaps next time, my commitment
device needs to refer to specific drafts I need to finish.
Is this streak going to continue after I come back from my trip? I’m
pretty sure it won’t, because it’s been really time-consuming. I spent
too much of my free time, and even significant amounts of my time that
should have been dedicated to other purposes, thinking up topics I could
blog about. It wasn’t necessarily an unproductive or unenjoyable way to
spend time, but I need to get my priorities straight and mathematics
(read: linear algebra homework aaaaaaaa) comes first.
Still, I feel like a renewed blogger after this and I’ll probably
keep posting irregularly. Life goes on. I hope this competition and my
presentation goes well and that the internet in China will be
endurable.
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